The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we're offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches.

Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we've gained? In Data and Goliath , security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He shows us exactly what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you to protect your privacy every day. You'll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.

LOVEINT: Between 2011 to 2012, according to an NSA self-audit, NSA employees illegally spied on 2,776 persons they knew and were curious about! Nobody went to jail for this, and that self-audit, with zero oversight, was probably a very, very low number as opposed to the number of actual spying! Read pp. 139 - - 140, where Schneier destroys the argument as to mass surveillance being necessary to prevent terrorist attacks! This is one very scary book. Read this and Robert Scheer's book, They Know Everything About You, to fully grasp that they know everything about you, which means they can fabricate anything about you they wish to, for any reason. See the comment on LOVEINT again! Schneier does a great job of explaining how they can correlate data from large data sets to identify people - - which again begs the question: So why didn't they prevent the Boston Marathon bombing? So why didn't they prevent the Underwear Bomber? Something is rotten in Big Brother Land???

Summary

Schneier was the leading security guru. Now he is also interested in public policy on Big Data. This book discusses the magnitude of the privacy problem, and how we can influence government policy makers. It also tells you what you can do to protect your privacy, while you wait for policy changes.